Tech for the Local Church
Editorial
Tech-Buying Tips: Stewardship of Time, Energy and Expense
Oct 22nd
This short, straightforward article, “Small-business owners might need outside help with tech,” by Laura Petrecca of USA Today is loaded up pretty heavily with good advice and practical guidelines for her target audience, and I think it’s similarly suitable and potentially helpful for the Ministry Vault audience– people in ministry who are also into tech-tools as vehicles for ministry. In particular, those of us who are over-committed, under-funded and tech-savvy more by intuition and stubborn persistence than by formal training and programming certification.
The bullet-basics of the most relevant info touch on …
- cost — just because buckets full of money can be poured into tech upgrades doesn’t mean that they should be … especially now that so much is shifting to the cloud.
- security — data back-up and access-authorization controls are all too often loved “in word in tongue” but no so much “in action and in truth,” and it is essential to know the word, security, and not merely listen to it, but “do what it says.”
- social networking — more and more prospects (as much for flock in the fellowship as for stock on the shelves) are being “moved” by way of micro-messaging in webs of personal interconnections. It’s nothing to question or disparage– it just is, and we need to make it work for our mission.
The cut-to-the-chase suggestions are copied after the jump.
Facebook Saves Face
Oct 20th
The thought of someone sharing something personal on Facebook used to make me roll my eyes condescendingly to subtly establish my (humble) superiority. I think differently now. I am not a total convert; I still think it is sadly rampant with narcissistic, lonely souls, but a couple of weeks ago, I did have a “Facebook moment.” We recently discovered our daughter needed surgery to remove a tumor from her face — her upper jaw. More >
Printing a Building: the Future of Construction is Now-ish
Oct 20th
It is now possible to “print a house.” Not a picture of a house. Not a scale model plan for a house. While the input of construction design ideas has almost completely moved into the digital world, the output of some of these designs can increasingly go straight to actual materials. Software in. Concrete “Hard-ware” out. From clicks to bricks. For at least the last five years or so, the technology of building construction has been veering off on a skew line from the contemporary fashions of glass and stone and steel, and, in the process, may be offering the church a path to loving our neighbors as ourselves in a most remarkable way, esp. those neighbors who are “the least of these brothers of ours.” This technology may literally put new, affordable, secure, easily-built housing at our fingertips– with the click of a mouse button. Here are just a few links to demonstrate and confirm the concept:
Media Shout 3.*, Part III: It Loves Me? It Loves Me Not! Well, Maybe a Little …
Oct 19th
So far it looks like The Glitches in our church’s version of Media Shout (3.0) seem to have been resolved with the registered upgrade to 3.5.742. I have not had a surprise lock-up or shut-downs in the 2 weeks I’ve used it so far. That’s been very helpful — a very welcome development. One serious, brow-furrowing glitch remains which involves arbitrary, phantom text exchanges/loss, but I’ll hold off on that in anticipation of the Media Shout interview we hope to arrange for an upcoming podcast episode of The Vault.
I don’t think these program bugs should have existed in the earlier version, but then I wish I had been perfect in my younger years, too.
Hey, it is a fallen world, after all. No, the program bugs seem to have been exterminated, and it’s right to give that fact its ‘propers’.
And it’s also reasonable to document the issues that I still find problematic in the User Interface.
I’ll keep it short and hopefully not too un-sweet. It’s not that I’m mad exactly … just disappointed.
Here are the few improvements I expected to see in the 3.5 upgrade (but didn’t):
MediaShout 3.*, Part II: Puppy Dog Tears, Free-Floating Fears & a Couple of Reluctant Jeers
Oct 18th
There are MUCH bigger problems in the world than my troubles with MediaShout 3.5 (and the original version we started with), but there are ongoing problems with this program we paid good cash money for, so I’m cataloging my issues here. The troubles fall together in two categories: Glitch-Bugs and Interface-Fails.
In this post, I’m going to address the glitch-bugs which plagued us in the original version we bought.
Next time, I’ll look at what seem to me like glaring user-unfriendliness issues with text and layout formatting controls and defaults.
I am very happy to say, though, that very gracious contacts have been made by someone at mediashout by way of Twitter, and there is a good possibility that we’ll have a podcast interview with a company rep very soon. I hope to find out that it’s all a misunderstanding on my part. And if it is, I’ll spend at least twice as much time writing up heartfelt cheers for all the ways it works well and and sincere apologies for how wrong I was all along. I hope that’s exactly what happens.
In the meantime, I ain’t a hater, but …
MediaShout 3.*: How Do I Hate Thee? I Begin to Count the Ways …
Oct 16th
I honestly — sincerely — do not intend to be provocative or be seen as hostile with this title line or the content of this whole post, but, also, I wouldn’t write it if I didn’t mean it. I’m not trying to make anyone mad, hurt anyone’s feelings or cost anyone a job, but I am writing this because good money was spent in good faith, and the program’s performance was and is extremely poor. The simple fact is: it is NOT stable. It is so unstable, in fact, that it’s almost unusable, and I wish I didn’t have to use it at all.
And that’s a REAL problem, because, at our church, we had and have very little money to spend on this part of our service-support equipment, and we spent it in good faith on Media Shout 3.[something]. We don’t have money to buy anything else right now, and we definitely won’t consider upgrading to a 4th generation version of the program since what we have has been so problem-ridden.
We needed it to work, and we needed it to be user-friendly for volunteers of varying computer-skill levels, and we needed it to solve problems and increase our effectiveness. We expected it to have some basic, common functions which have been standardized in word-processing and graphic presentation software for years. Unfortunately, it has never measured up to these needs and expectations.
Let me be sure to clarify that any and all comments here are ONLY my opinions based on my actual experiences, and they only apply to our registered copy of the 3rd generation — both the one that we bought and the version 3.5+ which was downloaded as an authorized upgrade after the morning services on Sunday, October 3rd, 2010. I can hope that our copy (and subsequent upgrade) was somehow incorrect, damaged or corrupted, but I don’t make that assumption.
Top 5 Ministry Vault Sponsorship Cold Calls (We Won’t Be Making)
Oct 10th
Top 5 Ministry Vault Sponsorship Cold Calls We Aren’t Going to Make
5. Joel Osteen’s Barber’s Neighbor’s Accountancy Firm
(from what we understand, the senior partners might be troubled by our ‘you-name-it-we-claim-it’ approach to itemized business expense deductions)
4. Dan Brown
(there’s no mysterious document hidden in a cryptex which explains why either …)
3. Scientology
(we want to be absolutely ‘clear’ about that, okay?)
2. Two Words: Ashton Kutcher
(he drops his Twitter account just about the time I sign up for one … coincidence? I don’t thi- … um, yeah … actually, it is.)
… And the Number One Ministry Vault Sponsorship Cold Call We Aren’t Going to Make:
Choosing a Web Designer
Aug 27th
Who do you trust? Who is the expert? How do you know if a web designer is worth his weight in salt?
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a web designer. My policy is to give away information and sell a service. Early in the process with clients, I go through a “discovery” phase – finding out where they stand with their site, then I take them through a teaching phase- so that the decisions that follow are informed. This is when I often find that the clients have had a bad run with their last “webmaster” (I use that term lightly). Hindsight is 20/20 and this is a particularly hard lesson when a bad website is publicly displaying your decisions… for better or worse.
Here are a few questions you might ask to ensure your decision to hire a company or individual is a good one: More >
New to Social Media for Church?
May 19th
There are a lot of considerations when deciding to get involved in social media on behalf of your church. The easy part is creating profiles at the various sites. But along with doing that, you should do the following:
- Come up with goals – how will you know if spending 20 hours a week on FaceBook is actually achieving anything?
- Come up with some kind of policies – how much time do you expect staff to spend on social media? Will you allow your staff to post disparaging remarks about your church?
- Create profiles at ALL of the social media sites (even if you don’t intend to use them) – this reserves your name for maybe using it the future, and prevents someone else from posting on your behalf
- Tie all the profiles you do want to use together so that one post syndicates across all the sites – try Ping or PixelPipe
- Set up a Google Alert to notify you whenever someone mentions the church name anywhere on the internet – remember, social media is a conversation, not a bullhorn
And as a primer, read through this short Top Ten List of do’s and dont’s.
Veterans – what else would you recommend?
Pastors Took Up An Offering To Buy Me An iPad
May 12th
Seriously. Yesterday, after I finished teaching a class of pastors and volunteers how to save money and still have a killer website, one of the pastors stood up, came to the front, and told the others who attended to get out their pocketbooks and put their cash on the table to by me an iPad.
THAT IS AWESOME. This could possible be the first iPad offering in history. I suppose my efforts to “convert” them to the Mac side is working.
No, I don’t have enough to buy it yet, but I am on my way.
Social Media in the Church
Apr 13th
I just taught a 2-hour workshop on “Social Media and the Church” at William Jessup University in Rocklin, CA. About 30 pastors and workers showed up to learn, contribute and discuss. I fear that THEY taught me more than I taught THEM.
Key Learnings about the use of Social Media in Churches:
- Most churches are cautious, but consistent. The group I surveyed cited face to face relationships as a higher priority than new technology. They need to be convinced it makes sense and serves a real purpose.
- There really is an age gap - the younger the pastor, the more likely they are to use social media. No surprise, but it did seem somewhat polarized in the room.
- Connecting people scares churches – especially if it is happening outside the safe walls of the church website.
- Driving traffic to the church Website is a welcome byproduct. Driving people to the curated, walled garden of the church website may be social media’s saving grace for churches.
- The Website will remain the flagship of tech in the local church…. but social media will help enrich – not replace – the experience.
Stay tuned, there will be more posts on the content of the Social Media workshop coming soon.
-Brook Drumm
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